5.30 – Ramez Naam – Inner Space vs. Outer Space in Science Fiction and Science Fact — how the big future changes likely to impact us are much more about our ability to manipulate information and our own bodies and minds than about venturing into space

6.00 – Annalee Newitz – Knowing your Audience when Writing about the Future — who are you talking to, and what are you trying to tell them? Main points will be the differences between the mass audience vs. the scientist/policy maker audience; and the intended effects of writing realistic futurism, aspirational futurism or dystopian futurism

6.30 – Break for 10 mins

6.40 – Max More and Natasha Vita-More The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future Spring, 2013, John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Publishing.

7.10 – James Hughes — Why the Fight Against Austerity Today Lays the Foundation for a Sexy, High-Tech Future – Politics and economics have yet to face the fact that an increasingly automated economy will mean the decline of human employment, and the establishment of a basic income guarantee. Instead we have hand-wringing about reining in “entitlements” and calls for austerity to facilitate private sector job growth. Expansions of longevity are greeted with calls for pushing up the retirement age, ignoring the shrinking availability of jobs. In order to avoid a neo-feudal future with a mass of unemployed poor dominated by a super-wealthy elite we partisans are a radically better future need to join the fight against austerity economics, and put forward a path to a world in which all share in the growth of wealth from technological innovation.

7.40 – Panel: “Writing about the Future – and Getting Published”

8.10 – FIN! Get a bite to eat, go to a nearby bar, hang and chat – Humanity+ @San Francisco starts early in the morning (8am for coffee/tea)!

Note this event will be videoed

Confirmed Presenters:

Ramez Naam. Ramez is the HG Wells Award-winning author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement. His first science fiction novel, Nexus, about a drug that links minds and the struggle to control it, will be released in December 2012. His next non-fiction book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, lays out a path to use innovation to overcome the natural resource and environmental limits that face us, and will be released in March 2013. Naam worked at Microsoft for 13 years, most recently leading artificial intelligence and relevance work on the Bing search engine. He helped develop two of the most widely used pieces of software in the world: Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com. She has written about the intersection of science, technology and culture for Wired, The Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Science, Technology Review, Discover, New Scientist, 2600, NPR, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and many other publications. She’s the author of the forthcoming book Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (Doubleday, 2013); her previous books include She’s Such a Geek: Women Write about Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff (Seal Press). Annalee was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She was also a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2002-03.

Max More, PhD and Natasha Vita-More, PhD. Max More and Natasha Vita-More discuss their new book The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Future Human, Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, which will be released in the Spring of 2013.

James J. Hughes, PhD. James J. Hughes is the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and former executive director of Humanity+. He is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut where he teaches health policy and serves as Director of Institutional Research and Planning. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, and is working on a second book tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha.